A well targeted, effectively executed Ecommerce email marketing campaign can mean the difference between a lead turning into a conversion for your business or the sale going to one of your competitors. So is your email marketing strategy as efficient as it can be?
On top of making sure that your emails are enticing to your target audience, a well considered strategy should also keep in mind how other marketing avenues can amplify what you’re doing. Social media, for instance, is a prime example of a space that can be used to boost your email marketing efforts without having to carve out extra marketing budget for it to happen.
Why Social Media is a Great Way to Improve Your Email Marketing Strategy
There are many different ways to grow an online business. An airtight digital marketing strategy — eg. one that includes social media and email marketing quite prominently — is one way to start to build more positive momentum for your Ecommerce business.
When email and social media marketing are speaking directly to each other, supercharged audience engagement is a real possibility. Here are four ways to enhance your email marketing strategy with the help of social media.
1) Improve Engagement by Turning Social Media Followers into Email List Subscribers
A key differentiator between an email subscriber list and social media followers is that the former is owned by the business while the latter is the property of (and dependent on) the platform it is on. As long as you’re following all GDPR protocols, an email master list can be broken up into specific audience segments, each of which can be targeted with unique content to try and drive engagement. This kind of targeting on social media is only possible through paid ad campaigns, which can be both competitive and expensive to sustain.
Knowing this, it’s worth exploring how social media can help you grow your in-house email master list. Start by working to turn as many social media followers into email subscribers as possible. When done successfully, it can do wonders for your mailer campaign open and click rates.
In this instance, hard sell messaging is not likely to work. While a subtle post asking for sign-ups from time to time can’t hurt, incentivizing your followers is likely to yield better results. As you’ll see shortly, doing so can also help you to widen the reach of your emails.
2) Incentivize Social Media Sharing to Widen the Reach of Your Email Content
From rewards and discounts to offering access to exclusive content or special benefits, there are many ways to encourage your social media audience to subscribe to your mailing list without having to beg them to do so. On top of these being used to migrate leads and customers from one marketing avenue to the next, they can also be used as incentives to encourage existing subscribers to share your email content on social media. This widens the reach of your content in a fairly organic way.
Most businesses don’t go much further than adding social media icons to the bottom of their emails, hopeful that someone will end up sharing it with their followers. Experience (and analytics reports) will likely show that this is somewhat of a rarity. After all, well crafted content can only go so far. A bankable incentive will do the rest. At the end of the day, you’re asking your subscribers to do some “heavy lifting” for you, so make sure that it’s worth their while.
3) Create Holistic Digital Marketing Campaigns That Incorporate Both
As standalone avenues, social media and email marketing fulfill two very specific, predictable roles. Working as a collective, the sparks really start to fly. Ecommerce businesses should prioritize finding as many ways as possible for both to point directly towards each other no matter how big or small the campaign might be.
Making this a reality is easier with a holistic (or 360 degree) approach to digital marketing campaigns. Doing so means factoring in all available marketing channels and exploring all the ways that content can be cross-promoted and repurposed in a meaningful and relevant way. If it feels overwhelming because of the amount of avenues, start by creating channel pairs. By fusing social media with email marketing — like hosting a webinar that is exclusively promoted on social media, with additional resources only being shared to email list subscribers — small gains will soon turn into much bigger ones.
4) Use Social Media Analytics to Improve Email List Segments
Ecommerce businesses that take the time to curate email master lists into specific audience segments — targeting each with unique content for every campaign — have a much better chance of achieving higher conversion rates in the long run. Creating the right segments and getting these segments to engage as much as possible will require knowing as much information about your target audience as possible. The best place to look for that? Analytics data on social media, of course.
Pull reports of all organic and paid social media posts, focusing on those that performed the best out of the bunch. The info should give you a clear idea of who your most engaged customers are, which in turn will help you to check if your segments are misaligned. Once your lists are in better shape, focus all efforts and make your emails as interactive as possible. Analytics from these can in turn feed back into more successful PPC or SEM targeting in the near future.
Now that you know all about how to enhance your Ecommerce email marketing strategy with the help of social media, it’s time to spring into action. By ensuring that both of these marketing avenues are always pointing directly towards each other, it’s possible to not only improve engagement on your email marketing campaigns, but to potentially turn leads into conversions in the process too. If you’ve also worked social media and email marketing into your holistic digital marketing strategy, the chances of doing so are even better.
All that’s left to do now is to dive right in.
